


The Graze of Softest Pelt

by nonky



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-05-26 20:52:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6255394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonky/pseuds/nonky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The morning after the groundbreaking, Kara didn't want to leave him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Lee had a pilot's precision with his grip. He held her exactly as hard as he meant. Even when he was grabbing his hotshot problem pilot with a shouted reprimand, he was gentle. He never left a mark on her unless she started a fight - a real fight instead of an expression of concern voiced in sufficient volume to break her flight high. She had thought her skin was tough leather and warming fleece, grown too near her softer layers to desert her.

They'd had dozens, hundreds of little fights easily witnessed around the ship. Her skin remained inexplicably pale, smooth and flawless. But Lee loved her, one perilous time, and she felt bruised from her thighs to the top of her head. Her stiff shoulders echoed wary troubled thoughts behind her eyes. Gentle, measured Lee had gone away and spooked her, leaving a stranger who left rings of aching flesh bordering a body that quaked inwardly with a dread of warm hands and eyes.

He had grabbed her a thousand times but it was only when he made love to her she felt like Lee had been stripping her out of her skin. Kara felt like he'd kept it, leaving her more than naked in a way she couldn't survive. She'd barely recognized her own gleaming pelt, beautiful draped across his hands.

She woke choking.

She pulled on her dusty clothes and pulled Sam from the ground, like digging up a dead man and pushing him through the steps of a dance. She gave up her plane and her uniform, found a priest and created a version of herself who could marry a good man and use him to hide.

By the time Lee found her, Kara was wearing Sam like a disguise. When Lee looked at her he wasn't fooled, because he was carrying her ugly, worthless hide in his pocket, folded like a priceless sable coat.


	2. A Marriage of Equal Cost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She was so dear to him, every moment seemed like the perfect one to risk this error.

There was still a muddled, softened time for him to call this a bad dream. Eyes closed, body slack, mind pushing against instincts honed flanking her in the sky and on the deck, Lee could make this tragedy wait for him to be ready to see it. 

He didn't need to wake up to feel the drop of heart and soul into the abyss he knew for the lack of her. The recently created void shaped like Kara was familiar for his arms. There was still an impression in the dust next to him, ready to be wiped away the moment he gave in and moved to stand. 

Lee found he could breathe, if he did it carefully. He could speak if he didn't mind the urge to scream. He could think, very well, perhaps better than he'd be able to if he wasn't panicking. There had to be a plan now, because he'd poured all his hopes into Kara's hands and let her throw them down. The jagged pieces would cut him as he picked up his coat. There would be a cause for the way he could feel himself bleed.

The warmth of sunlight told him he'd slept long enough to give her hours to distance herself. He knew her well enough to say she'd done something meant to be unforgivable. The ache of disappointment started drumming in his pulse, even as the hangover warred with the urge to find her just to see her face. 

Kara somehow never understood forgiveness wasn't the question, because he was blaming himself. Her actions came from his own. Patterns and flight plans could go to hell because Kara and Lee were their own form of gravity. 

He could feel it swallowing them whole, his singular belief the only light as Sam linked arms with Kara and cheerfully delivered the death knell. He would move to counterbalance her punishment with his own equal doom. If they were never able to cross paths and join together, he could keep them at parallels so they could see one another across the gap.


End file.
